Sacred Science Book

A comment on my post on Darwin's novels mentioned an entry on another blog that connected for the commenter.

That blog is a couple of years old, but an interesting post on the Bible is not a science text.

BTW, I don't entirely 'follow' the blog I got this off....its a tad fiesty for my inclinations; but this post had a connection for me. Maybe it does for you too.

Servant Leadership?

Caught this quote, from the fellow who invented the term 'servant-leader', with a critical comment on the idea. It is from Creating Leaderful Organisations by Joseph Raelin (Berrett-Koehler Publications, San Francisco 2003)

Darwin's novels

I took some time off from a recent conference I attended to browse a local bookshop. In the history section I picked up Darwin’s two novels: the Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man, thinking I must re-read them.

As I was mulling over those who think that Darwinism’s ideas as they have now transmogrified inform the Genesis creation account. I don’t think Darwin saw it that way, though; and nor have many other commentators who consider that account of origins as in diametric competition with the biblical account.

The very title of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” in the light of its content, sets it at odds with Genesis 1.

Indeed, the claim at the outset denies that Genesis 1 does provide any information about origins, because if not self-sufficient, then how accurate? After all, if it did provide information (and not a mythic tale, as some seem to think it is), and was accepted, there would be no need for a competing account!

Darwin clearly thought that his thoroughgoing materialism set to right people’s views of the origin of life and all its forms, denying in terms that there was any real alternative and the alternative explanations offered being merely emergent from the materialism that he proposed as what is finally real.

But Darwin did more than make a claim about sources; he implicitly made a claim about the metaphysically basis for our take on final questions. This is not simply a claim about a technical matter that can be relegated to science’s closet of details, but is an over-arching statement about the nature of the world and our place in it, that has to throw other such claims into competition in their own ‘struggle for survival’

In Darwin’s formulation, man is attached to the soil, but without any ‘breathed in-ness’ of God, and no modelling by God, but by chance; this breaking the relationship of love and joining us not to a person, reflecting his image, but to dust, inevitably seen as being it its image; arisen in a struggle for existence that refers not to a very good creation, which is devoid of struggle, but to an already broken world where the hand of God is obscured by our rejecting of his kinship.

That Darwin sets out from a completely different starting point to the Bible is evident in that struggle for existence in Darwin presupposes and is based on a world in pain. The “Origin of Species’” claim of ultimacy detaches us from the personal and plants us squarely in the material. There is no middle ground.

Earthworm?

I was more than amused to read that the English polemicist Richard Dawkins likened Senator Fielding, to the Senator’s disadvantage, to an ‘earthworm’in his (Dawkins) recent outing in Melbournes festival of atheism.

My amusement was not for Dawkins, for his rapier wit, or delightful use of language; none of which was in evidence in the jibe, but against him; and for Fielding.

The background to this is that on an ABC TV program, Sen. Fielding aligned himself with those who believe that the creation is but a few thousand years old, as against the those who think that the cosmos, and earth to boot, are many billions of years old.

Dawkins was on the same program and declared the young age to be a ‘non-trivial error’, akin to thinking that the United States was only 8 metres from coast to coast.

I agree, it is a non-trivial error, but on the other foot. Dawkins’ position is akin to thinking that the United States is wider than the Earth!

But my amusement?

Dawkins, if you’ve not detected, or do not know, adheres at least implicitly to philosophical materialism: he thinks, or so it seems, that what exists is only material, or the result of material; thus mind is an epiphenomenon of matter, as is language and, for that matter, grand opera; but so, of course, are love, intellect,  and ideas.

When thinking of this, I think of Darwin’s recursive defeater; he observed something along the lines that if his idea of evolution was the result of random changes in a monkey’s brain, then what would commend it to our attention: the whole of our world becomes just a jangle of atoms aimlessly rearranged by mute forces. Whence ‘aimfulness’ when all that is real is mere aimlessness? How, then does anything have any meaning: everything has the same status and is finally a value-free pile of material; and nothing else.

So Dawkins’ comparing Fielding to an earthworm falls flat. What after all, is the basis for comparing intelligence in a material world where random material action has caused everything? With the only final point of reference being material, Dawkins can say nothing meaningful about either himself or Fielding and so his claim has no content, unless he can explain how value is derived from material when there is no reference for value within a material universe and no source outside it.

God used evolution?

I was discussing with a friend the notion that God might have used evolution to complete the creation.


We were talking about Wilder-Smith’s wonderful book “God: To Be or Not To Be” and came to the conclusion that for God to have used evolution he would have had to make it do that which it is not able to do.

That is, he would have to use change processes not to produce chance outcomes, but purposed outcomes. He would have to inject teleology into that which is purely stochastic.

But that means he would have made a thing (chance) which could not achieve his ends (a creative purpose) and so work against the thing made (chance); which is to say, that he couldn’t have used chance at all, because chance leads to dissolution, not creation!

So God could only conceivably use chance to create by not using chance at all, but by over-riding (guiding, people might like to suggest!) it. The very notion breaks down under the weight of its own incoherence.

Evolution weekend

A quote from a newsletter I received recently:

The compatibility, or lack thereof, of evolution and faith remains a hot debate among Christians. Prominent evangelical [Ecumenist] theologian Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. has said he finds it impossible to reconcile the two. While he does not deny that changes do take place in the animal kingdom and that there is even a process of natural selection, he firmly rejects theistic evolution and the argument that the process is entirely natural and in no case supernatural.
"God was not merely fashioning the creation of what was already pre-existent, nor was He merely working with a process in order to guide it in some generalized way, nor was He waiting to see how it would turn out," Mohler has said.

Which question?

Thinking further on  my previous post which was just a quote from Schaeffer's True Spirituality:
Schaeffer's driving us back to a universe that is at root personal indicates that final questions are of 'the personal' and not of material.
So discussion of origins, for instance, with all that such discussions suggest for 'first philosohpy' and how we make an ontological structure of our world (that is our conceptualisation of the world...the world in our head) comes up as either a question that is finally personal; that is, related to God and thus the only connection we have in these terms is the creation account in Genesis 1, and its corollaries throughout the Bible, or is finally material, when, to my mind, the question recurses upon itself and becomes its own annhialator.
If ultimate questions are finally material, then there is no real ultimacy to them, as the question becomes merely an arrangement of material and has no meaning beyond that arrangement.
This then puts Satre's first question into an interesting light. I think it was Satre, who proposed that the basic philosophical question is "why is there something, rather than nothing?"
From a materialist perspective the question is strange. It seems to ask about reasons, which are an attribute of personal volition, rather than causes in a strick mechanistic causal sense. If it is mere the latter, then the question is highly uninteresting, becuase it will just give us matter 'all the way back' and so grind to a halt in a tiresome regress. That is, it will tell us nothing more than we (think we) know now: that material is all we've got! We end up where we start out.
 However, if it is a question of reasons, then it is interesting. Only, how can it be answered if it is denied that the universe is finally personal?

A couple of articles that I think overlap:

Terry Mortenson on philosphical naturalism and Normal Geisler on beware of philosophy

A Christian philosophy?

I wonder if this is the starting point of a Christian philosophy. It's from Schaeffer's "True Spirituality" the beginning of chapter 5.

Its a long quote, but please stick with it.

Our generation is overwhelmingly naturalistic. There is an almost complete commitment to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. This is its distinguising mark. If we are not careful, even though we say we are biblical Christians and supernaturalists, yet nevertheless the naturalism of our generation tends to come in upon us. It may infiltrate our thinking without our recognising its coming, like a fog creeping in through a window opened only half an inch. Immediately, Christians begin to loose the reality of their Christian life. As I travel about and speak in many countries, I am impressed with the number of times I am asked by Christains about the loss of the reality. Surely this is one of the greatest, and perhaps the greatest reason for a loss of reality: that while we say we believe one thing, we allow the spirit of the naturalism of the age to come in upon us, unrecognised. All too often the reality is lost becuase the 'ceiling' is down too close upon our heads. It is too low. And the 'ceiling' which closes us in is the naturalistic type of thinking.
Now the Christian's spirituality, as we wrote of it in the previous chapters, does not stand alone. It is related to the unity of the Bible's view of the universe. Theis means that we must understand--intellectually, with the windows open--that the universe is not what our genreation says it is, seeing only the naturalistic universe. This relates directly to what we have been dealing with in the earlier chapters. For example, in chapter one we have said that we are to love God enough to say 'thank you' even for the difficult things. Now surely, we must immediately understand, as we say this, that this has no meaning whatsoever unless we live in a personal universe in which there is a personal God who objectively exists. To claim that we are to say 'thank you' to God in the midst of the hard things of life, without this being framed in the reality of a personal universe, in which a personal God objectively  exists, makes 'thank you' an absolutely meaningless phrase.
Similarly, in study two we  touched upon the same thing, when we saw that in the normal perspective it is very difficult to say 'no' to things and to self, in the things mentality and the self-mentality of men, especially in the twentieth century. But we saw that on the Mount of Transfiguration we were brought  face to face with a su pernatural universe. Here we find Moses and Elijah speaking to Christ as he is glorified. And we saw that this supernautural universe is not a far-off universe. Quite the contrary: there is a perfect continuity, as in normal life. So (Luke 9:37) the day after these things had occurred Jesus and the disciples went down the mountain and entered into the normal things of life. Indeed, the normal sequence was continuing while they were there on the mountain. There is a perfect example of the temporal and spatial relationship here. As they went up and climbed the mountain, there was no place where they passed into the philosophic other. As they went up the inclined plain of the mountain, there was no break. And if they had had watches upon their wrists, these watches would not have stopped at some point: they would have ticked away.  and when they came down, it was the next day and the normal sequence had proceeded. Here we find the supernatural world in relationship to the normal sequence and spatial relationships of the presesnt world.
Also in chapter two we considered Christ's redemptive death, which has no meaning whatsoever outside the relationship of a supernatural world. The only reason the words 'redemptive death' have any meaning is because there is a personal God who exists and, more than that, has a characrer. He is not morally neutral. When man sins against the character, which is the law of the universe, he is guilty, and God will judge that man on the basis of true moral guilt. In such a setting, the words 'the redemptive death of Christ' have meaning, otherwise they cannot.
Now we must remember what we are talking about: the fact that the true Christiain life, as we have examined it, is not to be separated from the unity of the full biblical teaching: it is not to be abstracted from the unity of the Bible's emphasis on the supernatural world. This make sense of the biblical image of me as a Christian, face to face with the supernatural world, as the bride, linking himself to Christ, the Bridegroom, so that he, the crucified, risen and glorified Christ, may bring forth fruit through me...
This is the Bible's message, and when we see it so, and are in this framework, rather than the naturalistic one (which comes in so easily upon us) the teaching that Christ as the bridegroom will bring forth fruit through me ceases to be strange. The Bible insists that we live in reality in a supernatural universe. But if we remove the objective reality of the supernatural universe in any area, this great reality of Christ the Bridebgroom bringing forth fruit through us, immediately falls to the floor, and all that Christianty is at such a point is a psychological and sociological aid, a tool; and that is all. So as soon as we remove the s upernaturalness of the u nivesre, all we have left is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which religion is to be simply a sociological tool for the future. In Huxley's concept of romantic evolutionary humanism, religion has a place, not because there is any truth in it, but because in the strange evolutionary formation, man as he now is simply needs it...Remove the supernatural from the universe, in thinking and in action, and there is nothing left but Honest to God [a book by Robinson], which deals only with the fact of anthropology, and has nothing to say to questions of the reality of communicating with God...All the reality of Christianity rests upon the reality of the existence of a personal God, and the reality of the supernatural view of the total universe.